Blog

The U.S. Postal Service is best known for delivering the mail. But did you know it’s also the number one seller of the most widely used type of alternative financial service in the United States? We’re talking about money orders, which function like prepaid checks. The Postal Service sold a whopping 97 million of them with a face value of $21 billion in fiscal year 2014.

With all those designer shoes, cutting-edge electronics, and trendy toys shipping into our homes via ecommerce, it’s only logical that sometimes the shoes won’t fit, the electronics won’t work, and the kids will have already moved on to the next hot toy.

The bottom line is that some of the stuff we buy needs to be returned. And that’s known as reverse logistics.

The story goes that Alibaba founder Jack Ma chose his company’s name for two reasons: He wanted to be ahead of Amazon alphabetically and he wanted a global-sounding name. It didn’t hurt that some people also associated the word Alibaba with “hidden treasure” – recalling the most famous story from The Arabian Nights.

Alibaba is China’s giant ecommerce platform that is now taking on the globe. Its September 2014 initial public offering in the United States was the largest ever, and Ma has signaled his interest in expanding here.

Here’s the good news: Mailers accept and support the U.S. Postal Service’s Seamless Acceptance (SA) program. And here’s the bad news: Implementing the program hasn’t been very seamless.

Ongoing data integrity problems, among other concerns, have delayed full implementation of the program. We found evidence of inaccuracy in the data and mailers raised similar concerns, prompting them to ignore the data, according to our recent audit report.

The Midwest is the nation’s “breadbasket.” New England has its Patriots. Appalachia loves its bluegrass music. And it never rains in Southern California. We all associate certain things with different regions of the country. Now, it seems, one of those things is mail volume.

Recent Comments

How many companies have you worked for that make an employee account for every 1/100 of their day (USPS time clocks are on a 1/100 per hour)? There should be an investigation into how much time USPS...

Latest Audit Asks

The 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA) allows the U.S. Postal Service to enter into bilateral agreements with foreign posts to promote an efficient operation of postal services with other nations. These agreements govern the exchange of international products and services...

The U.S. Postal Service has contracts for goods and services that are managed in three systems – the Contract Authoring and Management System, the Transportation Contracting Support System, and the electronic Facilities Management System. The contracting officer (CO) is ultimately responsible...

Comments Wanted

We encourage you to visit our blog, which has a new topic for discussion every Monday. You can also give us your thoughts and opinions about upcoming audits on our Audit Asks page. Please refer to our comment policy for further information.